Ratings For Cassidy Hutchinson Testimony Blow Trump & Fox Away

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According to the television ratings company known as Nielsen, the recent public hearing of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot featuring former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson was the committee’s most-watched daytime hearing so far among the prominent recent proceedings.

Only the riot panel’s June 9 public hearing, which was in primetime, garnered more viewers in the current series of hearings the committee is putting on. The Hutchinson hearing had over 13 million viewers — some 13,231,000, to be exact — across major networks including ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC. The hearing was evidently able to quickly garner a lot of attention, because the riot committee announced it just a day before it actually happened. For perspective, these numbers are significantly higher than those who ordinarily watch cable news. Fox News finished first among a group of major networks in viewership for the week of May 30, which provides a decent example, and they ended up with an average of 1.33 million viewers across the day and 2.01 million in primetime.

During the Hutchinson hearing, the former aide — who had close, personal access to key moments of the Trump era — revealed startling details. In testimony played by the committee Tuesday that she’d previously provided, Hutchinson relayed an incident she said she witnessed firsthand in which then-President Trump acknowledged and basically accepted the threat of dangerous weapons in the pro-Trump crowds in D.C. on January 6. That would mean he incited a march on the Capitol with the knowledge of weapons and potential deadly violence. Trump was watching: he posted over and over again on Truth Social about the hearing, and he’s subsequently continued his rants about Hutchinson.

“The support for the hearings has increased over time,” Celinda Lake, who’s president of the polling firm Lake Research Partners, said Thursday. “And what is emerging very, very strongly from the hearings is not just that Trump was responsible, but there was a faction of the Republicans, Trump Republicans, who were responsible as well. And that this was about overturning the will of the people, overturning the elections. And people take that very, very seriously.” The expansive public viewership connects to a push among members of the public for accountability, she indicated: “There is an evolving narrative. People see it as a crime, but they also see it as a criminal conspiracy… They demand accountability, and they’re very serious about what they consider accountability. And we are seeing these numbers increase quite dramatically over the course of the hearings, including with independents who traditionally don’t pay very much attention.” Read more at this link.